The present invention relates generally to cradle assemblies for moving items into and out of storage, especially the movement of items with irregular bottoms, or lower regions, into which a cradle assembly engages. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, the present invention relates to an improvement to a cradle assembly for the dry storage of watercraft.
The current improvement to such cradle assemblies enhances the engagement between the cradle assembly and the bottom, or hull, of the watercraft. Specifically the improvement includes adjustable supports designed to be aligned within the cradle to substantially conform to the general shape of the hull of the watercraft in order to better engage, support and transport the watercraft.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that watercraft transportation devices have existed for many years. However, most of these transportation devices are in the form of trailers or land anchored platforms that use the watercraft's power and/or a crank to pull the watercraft out of the water by its bow. For example U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,612,602, 6,099,014, 5,882,170, 6,520,728, 6,189,909, 6,446,997, 6,719,317, 6,752,099, 6,644,231, 6,490,987, 6,327,990, and 6,263,820, all disclose such transportation devices.
Additionally, the dry storage of watercraft is becoming increasingly popular over the years. This dry dock storage includes a stacked or vertical arrangement of vertical watercraft lifted from the water's surface and placed in the stacked arrangements. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,007,288, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, discloses one such watercraft storage system. However, the conventional art has a drawback based on the wide variety of watercraft that is currently popular. This wide variety of watercraft varies in length, depth and width along with various undulations and configurations that comprise the hulls of these watercraft. As such, any lifting apparatus used to place the watercraft from the water surface into the storage system should be able to handle this wide variety of watercraft. However, currently the surfaces of the lifting apparatus in the conventional systems that move the watercraft from the water surface to the dry storage area lack the capability and flexibility to vary their engagement locations in order to adapt to the variance in the hulls of the watercraft.
As such, what is lacking in the art is a cradle assembly that can vary its engagement locations to substantially adapt to the variance in the bottoms, or hulls, of watercraft in order to transport that watercraft to a storage area.
The present invention provides for an adjustable cradle support system that can be either manually adjusted or automatically adjusted to accommodate a larger selection of boats. The system can be preprogrammed in an unloaded state, to fit the popular boat bottom configurations. This adjustment can be computerized to make the adjustment prior to moving the boat into its birth or launching into the water. The automation of this system can be setup by bar code, card number, punch code or magnetic tape card and possibly a number of different identification systems. Once a user actuates the automated system, his particular boat can be identified and a series of electric motors can be actuated to operate drive shafts to position the screw drives so that roller support will fit beneath the boat hull and be positioned to lift the boat out of the water and moved to its racked position.